In order to manage a business, it is important to understand how the business is performing. Many organizations store various performance data, such as sales amounts, revenues and account receivables. Organizations use those data to evaluate their business performance.
There exist monitoring tools available for assisting users to monitor some performance data. Those traditional monitoring tools are rigid in their presentation of data. Presentation is driven by an author's view on the business, rather than the performance metrics and their status. Those tools display only pre-set views of specific items as determined by an author of the tool at the time of implementation. Analysis of displayed values may be possible, but it is limited to the pre-set views of specific items. Also, in many organizations, each department has its own store of performance related data and its own definitions of metrics. Those tools may be sufficient for department heads to monitor the performance within the departments. However, those tools are often not sufficient for users who need to see a common, aligned view of business performance of the entire organization. Furthermore, traditional performance monitoring tools do not adapt well to changes in business priorities, initiatives and processes. An authored, rigid display of performance data must be frequently edited to keep up to date with business changes. Editing is cumbersome and requires special skills.
Some existing comprehensive systems provide functions for analysing problems, but those systems are too difficult to use without special training.
Also, in order to provide better views of business performance, scorecard systems are proposed. Scorecard systems give scores to values to indicate values are good or bad. This improves intuitive understanding of values. However, existing scorecard systems are suitable for a department scale analysis and do not give overall views or more in-depth view of the performance of their business.
It is therefore desirable to provide an improved mechanism to allow users to easily monitor and analyse performance of their business.